United States: Professional Negligence

The Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed dismissal of negligence claims against a title agent, ruling that the buyer's March 2015 title insurance claim triggered a one-year filing deadline that expired before the September 2016 lawsuit. This decision clarifies when the clock starts ticking on professional liability claims against title agents and whether non-final liability rulings prevent defendants from raising timeliness defenses.

Expert testimony in complex litigation often determines case outcomes long before trial. Success depends on four critical decisions: selecting experts who can teach rather than lecture, preparing them to withstand cross-examination, connecting technical findings to quantifiable business damages, and maintaining narrative consistency across all case documents and insurance submissions.

The United States Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC fundamentally alters freight broker liability by eliminating a longstanding federal preemption defense. How will this ruling reshape carrier selection practices and expose brokers to increased negligent hiring claims across the nation?

Colorado law has long distinguished between the duty to defend and the duty to indemnify in litigation, but the state's construction anti-indemnity statute creates an unresolved tension with this traditional framework. When construction agreements are governed by statutory limits on risk transfer tied to proportional fault, how does a present duty to defend operate before that fault has been determined? This intersection of established legal principles awaits definitive appellate guidance.

The Ohio Supreme Court held that the sham-affidavit rule applies when an expert incorporates a prior expert report into a sworn affidavit. Once incorporated, the report becomes part of the affidavit and may be analyzed for inconsistencies.

In a significant victory for product manufacturers, the California Supreme Court rejected a novel negligence theory that would have imposed liability for failing to bring a potentially safer product to market more quickly. In Gilead Tenofovir Cases, the court held that a drug manufacturer cannot be liable for injuries caused by a concededly nondefective drug simply because it delayed developing or commercializing a different product that later proved safer.

An Illinois circuit court recently imposed $60,000 in sanctions on a law firm and attorney for submitting AI-generated fabricated case citations in court filings, marking a significant escalation in judicial penalties for artificial intelligence misuse. The case reveals how multiple instances of AI hallucinations across several filings, combined with inadequate disclosure and failure to take responsibility, led to one of the largest sanctions to date for AI-related misconduct in legal practice.

A U.S. court has ruled that a professional liability insurer breached its policy by settling a claim against one insured without obtaining consent from all other insureds named under the same policy. The decision hinged on the interpretation of an ambiguous consent-to-settle clause, which the court construed against the insurer under the contra proferentem principle, leaving insurers with important lessons about drafting multi-insured policies.

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